Can Your T&E Compliance Technology Bring Business Travelers Back in Line?

By Lauren Bowling07.26.16

I know, I know. I’m raising a big question in the title of this blog. I’m asking the question because I recently read an article about how a thoughtful travel program technology can actually bring business travelers back to using “in house” or “preferred providers” when booking travel.

The article states, “People traveling for business today often book their hotels online through a supplier website instead of using their company’s booking platform, perhaps unaware that the company booking platform provides carefully negotiated discounts at “preferred” hotels. Only 29% of travelers book hotels at the same time as air, and 50% of all business travel hotel/accommodation stays are booked outside the company’s hotel program.”

Why? These travelers likely aren’t using company programs for three reasons:

They have limited choices through the company program

The platform interfaces used for booking are cumbersome and difficult to use

Travelers can’t use their preferred hotels where they expect a certain level of customer service

To try and combat these bad user experiences, businesses have built better platforms and easier technology to bring their business travelers back “into the company” when booking their travel.

But it got me to thinking about if better tech can urge business travelers to use appropriate vendors and channels when booking, couldn’t a great compliance technology do the same for ensuring business travelers are always spending with the company’s best interests in mind?

The answer is yes – it can, and Oversight has the data and experience to prove it. In our most recent Spend Analysis Report, we reported that companies that implement an expense audit technology like Oversight saw a 70% reduction in instances of out-of-policy spending. 70%!

Why?

Having an expense monitoring technology communicates to employees that yes, you are looking at their spending and checking individuals’ adherence to policy.

Having an expense monitoring technology makes it easy to find said instances of non-compliant spending, and investigate. Our technology can also search for duplicates, “high risk” behavior and patterns of spending the human eye alone can’t detect.

Having an expense monitoring technology in place also means that over time it gets smarter at learning what’s normal and what’s abnormal for your business.